Passage from Camus' The Plague

Last night I got stuck on this brief passage describing desperate funerals in The Plague. I was thinking that if someone made a movie of the book, about a town in Algeria stricken with an unstoppable outbreak of plague, this would be a great and compelling scene to open with. (Turns out there is a 1992 film, set in South Africa, and featuring William Hurt and Robert Duvall; it went straight to video. I'll have to look into it.)

Cat prefers Kierkegaard.

This converted school had an exit at the back of the main building. A large storeroom giving on the corridor contained the coffins. On arrival, the family found a coffin already nailed up in the corridor. Then came the most important part of the business: the signing of official forms by the head of the family. Next the coffin was loaded on a motor-vehicle -- a real hearse or a large, converted ambulance. The mourners stepped into one of the few taxis still allowed to ply and the vehicles drove hell-for-leather to the cemetery by a route avoiding the center of town. There was a halt at the gate, where police officers applied a rubber stamp to the official exit permit, without which it was impossible for our citizens to have what they called a last resting-place. The policemen stood back and the cars drew up near a plot of ground where a number of graves stood open, waiting for inmates. A priest came to meet the mourners, since church services at funerals were now prohibited. To an accompaniment of prayers the coffin was dragged from the hearse, roped up, and carried to the graveside, the ropes were slipped and it came heavily to rest at the bottom of the grave. No sooner had the priest begun to sprinkle holy water than the first sod rebounded from the lid. The ambulance had already left and was being sprayed with disinfectant, and while spadefuls of clay thudded more and more dully on the rising layer of earth, the family were bundling into the taxi. A quarter of an hour later they were back at home. - Camus, from The Plague

Nativity poem by George Mackay Brown

George Mackay Brown was a 20th Century Scottish poet who lived in the Orkney Islands. He could make the myth and lore of the Orkneys suddenly gritty and real with one line or image. Here he does that with the birth of Christ. I love the filling-in of the Nativity story, the attentiveness to this unremarkable moment in the lives of the Roman soldier and the innkeeper, and the immense irony of the last line. A 'byre" is a cow shed. The shepherds the innkeeper grumbles at are not drunk, but have gotten word from angels that a savior is born. So they are just excited.

The Lodging

The stones of the desert town
Flush; and, a star-filled wave,
Night steeples down.

From a pub door here and there
A random ribald song
Leaks on the air.

The Roman in a strange land
Broods, wearily leaning
His lance in the sand.

The innkeeper over the fire
Counting his haul, hears not
The cry from the byre;

But rummaging in the till
Grumbles at the drunken shepherds
Dancing on the hill;

And wonders, pale and grudging,
If the strange pair below
Will pay their lodging.
                       -George Mackay Brown

Stanza from Roethke's "The Pure Fury"

This is stanza # 3 of 4 numbered stanzas, I was struck, real struck, by the line, A man's a beast prowling in his own house...


How terrible the need for solitude:
That appetite for life so ravenous
A man's a beast prowling in his own house,
A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood
Until he finds the thing he almost was
When the pure fury first raged in his head
And trees came closer with a denser shade.
                                    - From "The Pure Fury" by Theodore Roethke
                                                           

Insight from Joseph Brodsky

From an interview at the end of my copy of Nativity Poems:

But at some point I realized that I am the sum of my actions, my acts, and not the sum of my intentions.

The Horny Pilgrim: a true story of the Plymouth Plantation

Totally by accident and having nothing to do with the holiday, I happen to be reading books by and about the Mayflower Pilgrims and their early descendants. This morning I ran across this passage in Of Plymouth Plantation, by the primary leader, second governor and Mayflower passenger William Bradford. It is part of a chapter called "Wickedness Breaks Forth." 

See my numbered annotations following, please:


After a time of the writing of these things befell a very sad accident of the like foul nature in this government, this very year, which I shall now relate. There was a youth whose name was Thomas Granger. He was servant to an honest man of Duxbury, being about 16 or 17 years of age. He was this year detected of buggery and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.[1] Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it. He was first discovered by one that accidentally [2] saw his lewd practices towards the mare. (I forebear particulars. [3]) Being upon it examined and committed, in the end he not only confessed the fact with that beast at that time, but sundry times before and at several times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictment. And this his free confession was not only in private to the magistrates (though first he strived to deny it) but to sundry, both ministers and others, and afterwards, upon his indictment, to the whole Court and jury; [4] and confirmed at his execution. And whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, [5] others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not. [6] And accordingly he was cast by the jury and condemned, and after executed about the 8th of September, 1642. A very sad spectacle it was. For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle [7] were killed before his face [8], according to the law, Leviticus xx.15; and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them.
 
Upon the examination of this person and also of a former that had made more sodomitical attempts upon another... [9]
 

1. Is this what we should be doing with our turkeys today, if we really want to be like the Pilgrims?
2. Yeah, right, "accidentally." 
3. Bummer. Puritans are so frustrating!
4. Bestial and proud. I bet they tortured him, though.
5. Where's that one sheep with the perty mouth?
6. Did that one, yeah. That one, too, Oh yeah! No, not that one. C'mon, I do have standards.
7. Lesser cattle? Oh, right, that one goat really wasn't very attractive.
8. Okay, this is getting brutal.
9. Further Pilgrim wickedness I shall spare you. But there was some..

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody.

8 poems supposedly

Our Memoir

I was very young

at the time

of the anschluss

and only later

after a lost war

wielding hindsight

purged of memory

did I discuss our history.

   
Read the other 7 on this page here.
 

Heaney's journey to Aarhus

August 30, 2013 - Heaney died today. This is an excerpt, with some lines from the poet, from an unpublished essay I wrote about, among other things, my encounter with Ötzi the Iceman:

I’ve always loved old bones. I love their mystery, the tactile connection they represent to personal histories, so close yet so obscure. For me there has been no bigger thrill than peering into a gaping, ruined grave in Enniskillen to spy in the shadows an old browned skull and to imagine, just for a moment, just a sound the brain it held might have produced, just one emotion, one sensation. And if old bones were thrilling, then old faces, old noses, old fingernails and old whiskers were even better. Although I’d found they could disappoint, too. Once I had walked the long, grim, subterranean corridors of a monastery in Palermo where hundreds of dried mummies of all ages, dressed in their burial clothes, gazed back at me. Their poses bordered on clownishness and their display amounted to a violation, like a deprivation of promised sleep. They should have delivered me to a morbid nirvana. Instead they left me unmoved.

The Bog People by P.V. Glob

Then I read P.V. Glob’s classic, The Bog People (from the miraculous New York Review of Books imprint), about the fully-preserved Iron Age corpses found in bogs in Denmark and Ireland, men who were criminals, young women who were adulterers or in some cases sacrifices to the gods. I could spend an entire afternoon staring at photographs of the tormented, peat-stained, human face of the Tollund Man, his impressively aquiline nose, the vertical crease of mortal anguish in his forehead, the hangman’s noose around his neck still. I had read and re-read the poems the bog mummies had inspired in Seamus Heaney. For the poet, the Tollund Man, the Grauballe Man, the Bog Queen, and the brutality and cruel, ignorant sacrifice to which they bore witness, became useful symbols for the violent, religion-fueled predicament of the Irish of the 1970s. Here he would leave behind snipes and drowned farm cats as symbols and turn to something more ambiguous and better. “Opening The Bog People,” he told Dennis O’Driscoll, “was like opening a gate."

Through them Heaney could exercise his gift for ruthless identification and self-reflection. It’s all there in a bog poem called “Punishment,” with passages like these:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

This desire I feel and draw I find in Ötzi Heaney describes precisely in these stanzas from “Tollund Man:"

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap,

In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds,
Caked in his stomach...

Heaney dreamed of a journey to Denmark to see the Tollund Man, like mine to Italy to see the Iceman; I happen to know he made it. I could think of few better fates for a corpse than to become the inspiration for a poem, or a journey to Aarhus, by Seamus Heaney. And all Ötzi gets is me.
                                                                                     
                                                                                              -from "The Find"

Farewell, my friend, farewell: poem by Esenin

Farewell, my friend, farewell.
Dear friend, you're in my heart.
The predetermined parting
Promises reunion ahead.

Farewell, my friend, without handshake or word,
Don't grieve and knit your brow -- 
In life death's nothing new,
But life's, of course, no greater novelty.
                                                  Sergei Esenin
                                                   1925

Esenin, sometimes spelled Yesenin, dead and mourned.

A vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm - Poe's "Alone"

Combine the names "Booth" & "Poe" - and you get..."Both"

It started with the idle late night plucking from my bookshelves Paul Metcalf's Both, one of his many strange, imaginative, hybrid works. In this one, he documents the unexpected, ostensible parallels between Edgar Allan Poe and John Wilkes Booth, and not just in their appearances, signatures, and melodramatic personalities. Metcalf's list of sources for Both was so interesting that I began tracking them down, at least the one's I could afford. Some were so obscure that, even if I could find them on abebooks, I could never have afforded them. I really wanted to pull the trigger on The Mad Booths of Maryland, but at over $400, it'll just have to wait.

However, I could afford The Raven and the Whale, Perry Miller's dissection of the mid-19th Century American literary scene, especially in New York, its cattiness, its brawling, its factionalism, the births and deaths of its many journals, their great achievements and great failures, all their explicit scheming for an American Literature independent of English influence. How in service to this elusive American ideal -- the country was only 60 years old, technically -- the editors, writers and intellectuals, especially in New York, searched and begged and hedged and compromised, how they boosted any old tripe if it seemed American and new. And how, when what Duyckink and Matthews and their colleagues were looking for came, in the works of Melville, Whitman and Poe, they just didn't see. To be sure, they published and honored particularly Poe and Melville, and welcomed all three of them into their factions when they could be useful. 

This book will make you read Herman and Edgar anew

But they were blind to the fact that in their own time and city, the pillars of American literature had finally appeared. (Similarly, a couple of decades later, Col. Wigginson was incredibly supportive of that fourth pillar, Emily Dickinson, was a friend to Emily, but couldn't see the monumental achievement right before his eyes.)

Another Metcalf source I could find and afford was Frances Winwar's life of Poe, The Haunted Palace. And so I spent a few days in stunned contemplation of the abject sadness of Poe's existence. For years I have been known to mutter, seemingly out of nowhere, "Poor Herman," when suddenly comes to mind how poorly things ended up for Melville. But Poe's life, the constant death and early loss, the bitter avarice of his guardian, then the late death and loss, the addiction and the final, deep mental illness, trump Herman's own unsatisfying fate. Amazing how much Poe produced. How many magazines he catapulted to success. But always in the end something would break. I guess it is ironic, that his towering ambition was warranted, but often it was what caused him to crash, to have so start again from literary, financial and emotional scratch.

Metcalf, Winwar, Zagajewski, Poe (ed., Wilbur), Miller

And so I opened again the poems of Poe, including a volume edited, and with a helpful introduction by the great American poet Richard Wilbur. One particular poem, "Alone," stayed with me for awhile.

And then, just as I was moving on to other things, while reading Adam Zagajewski's poem, "The Generation," I came across these lines, which reminded me again of Poe's "Alone":

Two kinds of death circle about us.

One puts our whole group to sleep,

takes all of us, the whole herd...

...the other one is wild, illiterate,

it catches us alone, strayed,

we animals, we bodies, we the pain,

we careless and uneducated...

We worship both of them in two religions

broken by schism...

                -Adam Zagajewski

                  "The Generation"

Here is the Poe poem, also about two kinds of death. In its final image, it seems like Poe is characterizing his entire life, his haunted mind, the warp of his works. It's interesting about the warp of his stories and characters; it lurked always in their depths, only slowly to be revealed by the storyteller, often slowly to destroy him, as it did Poe.

Winwar ends her biography with a dream Walt Whitman described to a group of friends after a memorial for Poe at his re-burial in 1875. Whitman had met Poe a couple of times. Poe had been one the earliest publishers of Whitman's poetry, pre-Leaves of Grass. In Whitman's vision, he sees a "vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm... On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk and the dislocation of which he was the center and the victim. The figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems..."

To Winwar, writing in 1959, the figure was Poe, but also Poe as Modern Man, "conscious of a new dimension: the world within, whose storms, terrible in their revealing flashes, throw light, now more than ever, on the black, hidden regions of the soul."

Makes sense to me. Okay, here's Poe's poem, finally (note the italicized second "I" in line 8):

Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were -- I have not seen

As others saw -- I could not bring

My passions from a common spring --

From thw same source I have not taken

My sorrow -- I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone --

And all I lov'd -- I loved alone --

Then -- in my childhood -- in the dawn

Of a most stormy life -- was drawn

From ev'ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still--

From the torrent, or the fountain --

From the red cliff of the mountain --

From the sun that 'round me roll'd

In its autumn tint of gold --

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass'd me flying by --

From the thunder and the storm--

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view--

Another poem by R.S. Thomas

Tell me, what did Shelly dream? And how did love deceive him?

1963 edition, dedicated to the great James Hanley

Song at the Year's Turning
Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.
The props crumble. The familiar ways
Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.
The heart's flower withers at the root.
Bury it, then, in history's sterile dust.
The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.

Love deceived him; what is there to say
The mind brought you by a better way 
To this despair? Lost in the world's wood
You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.
The earth sickens; under naked boughs
The frost comes to barb your broken vows.

Is there blessing? Light's peculiar grace
In cold splendour robes this tortured place
For strange marriage. Voices in the wind
Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.
                                                                                  Winter rots you; who is there to blame?
                                                                                  The new grass shall purge you in its flame.

R.S. elsewhere on the blog: "Somewhere"